The Green Lantern star said to Total Film: "That movie is alive and kicking, and then it's dead as a doornail. Then it's alive and kicking and then it's dead… it's like the worst relationship I've ever had.

"The character knows he's a comic book character, he knows he's in a film, he knows who the executives are at the studio making the movie. In the current iteration of the script, Deadpool is aware of the Wolverine movie.

"He doesn't say anything disparaging about it but he does at one point play with the Deadpool action figure with some curiosity."

"[The Deadpool script has] got a similar tone [to Zombieland], almost. They wrote it and they developed it as well and, you know, it's sitting there," he said.

"You could do it for a pittance compared to the modern sort of epic scale superhero movies, but it's about a guy who knows he's in a movie and knows he's in a comic book who is deeply mentally disturbed and hyper-violent. And that's tough to get by a studio."